C’est que des produits français.

Quelqu’un va devoir aviser Torvalds qu’il est maintenant Français. Blague à part, je comprends le choix de vocabulaire car la majorité de ce qu’ils doivent utiliser doit être des logiciels maison, mais reste que le système d’exploitation lui-même n’est quand même pas français.

Oh no, not the poor car industry! Think of the jobs! Giant corporations need help! /s

There’s some hikers and campers that like to make a thing called a ramen bomb. Just instant noodle with instant potatoes. It works, for some.

I tried Concerta and it helped. I would have continued but getting it was a hassle. It was super controlled and I couldn’t live with the restrictions.

It was impossible to refill a bottle before the exact same day it was supposed to be empty. Not one before. And I couldn’t get it at any pharmacy from my pharmacy’s network. I was only supposed to get it at my local pharmacy.

So going anywhere required counting how many pills I had, and plans to get back home before I run out. Going on vacation needed my doctor’s approval to get more pills than usual.

I really didn’t like how they treated me so I stopped taking it and went back to self medication.

Something something reality has a well known liberal bias.

This depends where you live. Prices can be relative.

I live in an apartment and electricity is included in the rent. I have not seen an electricity bill for most of my life.

I also have a cabin off grid and installed solar panels. In summer, I cover most of my basic needs with four 100W panels. Lights, laptop, phone, speakers, fan, water pump, sometimes a small fridge, are all powered by a few batteries and the sun. I only use gas for cooking.

If I had a house I would get an electricity bill, but the price of electricity in my part of the world is pretty low compared to other places. Someone living in Australia or France will pay double of what I would pay. But I’d still complain it’s too high.

This reminds me that ths US Defense Department issued a warning about the painted quarters because they thought it was spying tech.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alleged-canadian-spy-coin-deemed-harmless/

The odd-looking — but harmless — “poppy coin” was so unfamiliar to suspicious U.S. Army contractors traveling in Canada that they filed confidential espionage accounts about them. The worried contractors described the coins as “anomalous” and “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology,” according to once-classified U.S. government reports and e-mails obtained by the AP.

TBF I never liked Steam for the fact that I don’t own the games. If Valve vanishes, all the games people ‘buy’ are also gone.

I’m an old PC user that started with DOS and played BASIC games, and I’ve never been a fan of Valve or Steam. They did progress tremendously under Linux and brought a gaming revolution to the system, but they are still a capitalist corporation selling digitally locked products that we don’t really own.

A—Aurora Borealis? At this time of year! At this time of day! In this part of the country! Localized entirely within your pockets?!?

Don’t worry, soon people will all switch (buy buy buy!) to electric cars and the problem will be fixed forever. Unless it’s not economically advantageous to do so. In that case we will keep burning fossil fuel since its cheaper than EVs that would be marginally better. Anyway I’m sure we, or AI, will find solutions soon.

Don’t point out my giant SUV, I recycle and have reusable bags! It’s not my fault.

Sorry but this got me thinking about a punk rock song in Québécois from when I was was much younger.

Vulgaires Machins - Pop-corn

Between my teeth there is a piece

Of popcorn that is stuck

I don’t know what to do

It’s the fourth toothpick that I destroy

The third time that I vomit

I’m going straight to hell

All my friends are turned at me

Even the police is here

Security perimeter

It’s chaos

Meanwhile outside

Wondering what is going on inside

My fans are hailing me

Please no pictures

In Québec they were a bit more diverse and also named lots of places after saints.

It always depends to what you compare. I visited Germany twice for a total of about 15 days, taking trains mostly every day, and I don’t recall any major issues. I read online since my first visit in 2016 that it got much worse so I expected at least some issues when I went back in 2024, but it went well, either in RE trains or in ICE. Of course, it’s a very small sample and I’m Canadian, so anything more than five trains a day and not yielding to freight is just magical to me.

Ambulances and emergency vehicles. I live in a busy place and there’s lots of ambulances and emergency vehicles passing on the streets in front of my place. Several times a day. And the most annoying ones are the ambulances just switching the siren on and off every few millisecond.

I understand the need for expediency but those loud sirens are extra loud so that car drivers can hear them while sitting in their insulated bubbles, while the rest of us have to suffer through that noise. If emergency vehicles were so important, they would have emergency lanes in places where they have to go frequently, so they don’t get stuck behind traffic and don’t have to lay on their insanely loud horns and jerk their sirens.

Random fact: it’s because of a rich entrepreneur from Portland that my small native town in Québec got a railway in 1850. The first international railway was between Portland and Montréal. It still exists.

The line was proposed as a connection between Portland and Sherbrooke, Canada East, in 1844 by Portland entrepreneur John A. Poor. Portland was desperate to connect its ice-free port with Montreal, and Maine was at risk of being eclipsed by a similar proposal running from nearby Boston, Massachusetts.

All those poor Tamagochis

Android? I’m know I’m old but the only time download managers were useful was when we used dial-up and unreliable internet connections. And Android was not around then.

I used GetRight at the end of the 90ies but it stopped being necessary when I got DSL. I never even used one on Android because it wasn’t needed.

Spoiler ahead for B5: And then Icarus will discover a strange dark ship.

Unfortunately yes. It’s kind of a reverse “big city” problem here. In towns and small cities a lot of stores are demanding people to leave their backpack at the front counter and grab it back when they leave. I grew up in a town of ~7000 people and everyone has a car, just like in the US. Everyone is dependent on a car. So stores don’t want backpacks because they’re associated with mischievous students. Why don’t you just leave your backpack in your car? In fact, why don’t you have a car? Why the fuck do you need a backpack?! Are you a kid or something?!

I moved to Montréal nearly two decades ago and I’m happy to be car free. But every time I go back to my hometown, I get reminded that adults walking around with a backpack is not the norm in that part of the world. In bigger cities and dense areas, there’s enough people without a car to just walk everywhere with a backpack and it becomes impossible to demand everyone to leave them at the counter. And people might protest it anyway. It’s one thing to demand teenagers to leave a backpack with a random store employee, but it’s another to demand office workers to leave their backpack containing a corporate laptop with a random store employee.

Whenever I encounter this practise, I get a bit insulted and usually refuse to play their game if I have a backpack with me.

US problem. I live in Montréal and locked items in pharmacies is generally not a thing here. We can even walk in most stores with our backpacks.